Epilogue

Call me Ridley, we can turn this ship around: there remains a slim hope this might be rescued – a follow up to Prometheus is planned. You could pretty well much dump most of Prometheus and concentrate on Shaw and David, what they find, and what that can lead to, or be shared, with other explorers. It does not have to be engineers in biomechanoid suits – that could just have been one species that shared a design and technology with something else – a something that is a terrible and cruel creator of genetic technology.

Imagine that all we saw in Prometheus was one race of explorers who mimicked the tech they discovered. We know there was a dollop of Lovecraft’s existential dread of the extinction of the human soul, of evolution degenerating, of a future where the best we could hope for was a relatively painless extermination. If you want to make a horror film that honours Alien, it has to be smart, avant garde and disturbing in a very primal way (the ship’s captain standing during landing, as if G-forces are little more than a difficult surfing, will not fly). Terror is knowing that even the smartest people will be defeated, that there is no getting out of it, that intellect and morality, bravery and compassion, ruthlessness and ambition will matter not one jot. It is just a matter of how to cope with your relentlessly approaching, pain filled, vanity shattering, dignity stripping annihilation.

I guarantee that if you hire me, at least ten percent of the audience will be driven to insanity – or your money back! And there’ll be a cat in it.